Music Features
Artists to Watch: Motion City Soundtrack
We saw bands like The Ataris and The All-American Rejects successfully take their punk sounds pop. A recent addition to the Billboard charts, Motion City Soundtrack are appealing to a more mainstream audience with their fourth studio release My Dinosaur Life, which landed a respectable No. 15 back in January.
A group of guys from Minneapolis, lead singer and guitarist Justin Pierre and backup singer Joshua Cain—the only two remaining members of the original lineup—join drummer Tony Thaxton, bassist Matthew Taylor and keyboardist Jesse Johnson in the current crew. It took about five years since the band’s 1999 debut for the lineup to fall into place, while they accrued a strong fan base and signed with Epitaph Records.
Motion City struck mainstream gold in 2007 when they charted with Even If It Kills Me, which received a No. 16 debut on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Independent Albums charts. Singles “Broken Heart,” “This Is for Real,” and “It Had to Be You” gained some television exposure, also assisting in the rise of the MCS name.
My Dinosaur Life, released on Columbia Records and recorded with industry guru Mark Hoppus, is the first album from the band to be distributed by a major label. MCS also claims a spot on the acclaimed soundtrack to the Tim Burton film Alice in Wonderland. The song “Always Running Out of Time” appears on Almost Alice, which was released March 2, in the mix of famous artists including Avril Lavinge, The All-American Rejects, Owl City, All Time Low, and Franz Ferdinand.
In case that wasn’t enough for one year, the band is slated in the lineup for the 2010 Vans Warped Tour—a tour that has recently weeded out the mediocre acts due to losing several sponsors and is focusing more on up-and-coming bands of substance like Motion City Soundtrack. MCS are also playing dates in the UK in March prior to retuning to the US for several shows and hitting the road with Warped Tour.
MCS will also join The Bamboozle Hoodwink—where bands stand in as other bands… literally—in East Rutherford, NJ at the end of April paying tribute to NIN. They will take the stage the same weekend at Bamboozle as themselves.
Breathing life into the dying genre of punk music, they are giving the music a more listenable feel, which is why we are seeing MCS on the charts and why they are selling records. Motion City Soundtrack is making punk cool again—and that’s their soundtrack.
